


Valentines

by CrossedBeams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Drabbles, F/M, Fluff, Through the Years
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: 25 years of February 14th





	1. 1-7 (1994-2000)

**(‘94)**

The first year it was a half melted Hershey kiss that he found in his coat pocket and dropped on her desk with a wink. “In case that date of yours forgets Scully.’ He hopes the date forgets, and she rolls her eyes to fill the space where she might have to otherwise lay the truth. There is no date. Post Jersey Devil and Rob, the beige of most men has lost its interest. She admits to herself in the silence after he goes that she wants his tossed away afterthoughts in their small, private darkness, more than she wants candlelight or grand gestures. She eats the candy and thinks that it tastes like possibility.

* * *

 

**(‘95)**

In a way they have both died this year. She still feels the dull edges of her missing time press on every day and she wonders if, once he is recovered, he will feel the same. There’s a torn red tissue heart on the floor next to the vending machine when she rests her head on it, hoping for clarity with the coolness, with him half a degree from death one room away. When the danger is passed she buys him a card from the kiosk in the lobby, reduced for being past its date. It features a cross-eyed cat and declares “I’d spend all nine of my lives with you”. The look they share wonders how many lives they have used up, whether there are imprints of them lying cold in Pfaster’s closet, in the frigid submarine air, in the places they can’t remember and can’t seem to find a way to talk about. Survival is the best gift they give that year.

* * *

 

**(′96)**

He comes back, and the sinking weight of him on the end of her couch is the promise she didn’t know she needed. It has been a runaway year and there have been moments where she wondered if she is not his only one, wondered if maybe she needs to find a way to stop him from being hers. Between girls named Bambi and solo expeditions it has felt a little like he is leaving her behind. But he comes back and sits on her couch and they don’t say anything. Silence is their safety blanket and it settles like heavy snow over the cracks of the year, whiting out her questions until they are back on the same page. He brought Chinese food and she brought forgiveness. They both leave satisfied.

* * *

 

**(’97)**

She can’t smell the white roses over the antiseptic and death creeps into their embrace. St Valentine isn’t even a real saint but she doesn’t think that will stop Mulder from martyring himself. She can still feel Jerse in the muscles of her thighs, in the disturbance of tissues left untouched for too long, now ruffled by passion and brutality and the threat that  _that night_ , and that man will be the last to love her the way she wants to be loved. She wishes Mulder’s roses were red, and his kisses too. She wishes he would bloody the pure, hospital white of their love and bruise it into muscle memory, before it’s too late. His lips are dry and so are her cheeks. 

* * *

 

**(′98)**

She wanted to be in Maine. On a mountain. In the tub. Anywhere except back at work, chasing an AI that she isn’t sure she believes in with three stooges on her side and Mulder off somewhere with nightmare makeup and the body of a co-ed. It ends on Valentines day in tragedy, romance with a deathwish and over bad diner coffee Scully ponders what she would do if she were left behind to choose between a world alone or some kind of half-life with Mulder. She smiles bitterly as it occurs to her that perhaps she’s already living it and is surprised to feel Mulder take her hand and squeeze. It isn’t until she looks back down from his hopeful face that she notices the candy heart slid across the table to rest against her coffee cup. It says ‘smile’, and she will not ask for her gift back, however unintentionally it was given.

* * *

 

**(′99)**

Until today she hadn’t known that she could hate anyone so completely as she does the Cigarette Smoking Man. To throw away two sons, to strip away their sense of safety in the world, their ability to believe in family or goodness or even just wake up knowing who exactly they are… If it weren’t for all the cancer man has done, there would be no Agent Fowley, no conspiracy, no lost sister waiting to step out whenever Mulder found some small peace. But there are all of those things and a small voice in Scully’s head wonders if perhaps she too has become part of Mulder’s personal hell, her sleepwalking feet carrying her into danger and dragging him in yet another direction. If he could be a father, if he could love someone whole and untouched by all this darkness, then perhaps he could forge something new and clean where the light would warm without burning. She will not let Fowley have him, but she decides, standing at 2am before a rack of romance VHS tapes in a convenience store with no name, afraid of her own sleeping mind, that once this is over she won’t let herself have him either. She will give him the freedom nobody else has ever allowed him. The freedom from duty, guilt, and a history so heavy it can never be escaped. She will give him up.

* * *

 

**(2000)**

She gives him permission to answer her phone at 8am, knowing it is her mother and knowing how much it will mean to him for her to tacitly acknowledge that he is where he belongs. That he belongs to her. In the hazy morning light she threads her fingers int the hairs on his chest and lets his warmth flow into her. He sounds giddy, passing the time of day with her mother and she realises that perhaps being a part of her mess of a family is part of what he wants. He has nobody left and she feels suddenly bad for keeping their secret selfishly to herself. When he’s done she rolls onto him, stretching along him until her bare toes brush his ankles and they are nose to nose. She doesn’t blink when she tells him she loves him and he doesn’t stop kissing her until they are both out of air. Then there is no space for thought and they leave both their families, dead and living, to tangle with the sheets at the foot of their bed. Perhaps Saint Valentine is worth a damn after all, she thinks, trapped in a small slice of heaven with Mulder’s hand counting rosary between her legs. Perhaps Hallmark have a point, she writes on the signature line of his collarbone in teeth marks and tongue swipes. Perhaps love really can find a way, and he’s signing this love note heavy against her, firm strokes leaning into a happy ending as she falls apart beneath him. Perhaps this will last forever, perhaps they can go to sleep and wake again, and make love again and her mother will get the son-in-law she always wanted. There’s a warmth within her that makes it all seem possible, even the things she knows to be impossible. She believes, for now, in love and life and most of all in Mulder, the way he has always believed in her.


	2. 8 - 13 (2001-2006)

**(’01)**

It’s easier to avoid holidays that make your heart hurt in a city you know; she knows which streets to avoid and how to listen for an empty hallway before she makes her way to work. Boston makes everything harder, and the only blessings are that there is no room for romance in the tense subterranean bureaucracy of the metro system and that she can still hide her belly. She’d rather examine charred flesh and glowing remains than meet the eyes of someone expressing joyous well-wishes for her growing family or joking that “dad had better have got her something good for Valentines.” There’s no socially acceptable way to cut back with the fact that she’s gone from being part of a pair to half of a whole with a miracle just clinging on. She can’t explain that all she wants from “Dad” is a hint that he is alive and will come back to her, and that if she could she’d round up all the holiday crap in the world into a monumental pyre to burn a smoke signal big enough to reach him, wherever he is, and tell him she hasn’t given up hope. On the train back to DC she and Doggett stare out of their respective windows and mourn their lost Valentines. Neither of them will come home to cards or flowers. Neither of them will feel like home at all.

* * *

 

**(’02)**

It slips under the door between bedtime and the 2am feed like a promise, post-marks blurring into nowhere and three days late. He’s drawn a tiny third alien nestling between the two big green ones on the tacky greetings card and inside it just says, “I love you”, which is enough for 2am. She has years of everything else to remember him by, deep swathes of conversation and memory to dip into and pull out a moment that looks like them, feels like them… but she only has a few months of his love stripped bare. It’s something she holds on to, cherishes, polishes into shining moments to tell their son about in case he never comes back, because that is something explainable. You can’t explain to an infant how you knew you loved him when you shot him to save him, or how you knew he loved you back when he called you at 3am in tears to tell you  he’d fucked a vampire while you were dead and was so,  _so,_ sorry. Their story is a mess of entendre and as she nurses she walks those pathways of meaning, pulls out memories and bathes them in the light of his message. He loves her. Them. And that alone makes sense. 

* * *

 

**(’03)**

There’s a kid in the next booth who looks like their son and the Valentines $5.99 special tastes like ash in her mouth. Mulder’s hand squeezes under the table but he’s not holding her knee but his gun. She’d wanted to be among people. He’d wanted to do something, anything, to make it okay and so they drove 40 miles to a diner with low light and lower morals. She doesn’t even finish her fries. Later in the parking lot of their motel she smokes a cigarette down to the paper and burns her lip. Mulder tries not to flinch at the burned skin smell, the burned hope taste of her mouth but how can he deny her a vice when she has given up her whole life for him. He fucks her because she asks him to and comes because he can’t help it; he can see the woman he loves behind the smoke haze and the hurt and believes she will came back to him. He always had a knack for belief and it comes in handy when the only evidence they’re gathering is that nowhere is far enough to run away from a broken heart and a missing son. She hears him tell her he loves her as she pretends to sleep on the starchy, worn sheets and wishes that he didn’t. If he didn’t maybe she could stop loving him. If she could stop loving him, maybe she could leave, or die, or just go home.

* * *

 

**(’04)**

He remembered, January,mid-blizzard in a badly insulated log cabin, that she’d mentioned a holiday place in Colorado from her childhood once. The story had that far-away ring to it, the rosy recall of a place that is more a string of scents and snapshots than an actual memory; spoken of with hushed tones and faraway eyes. The next day he steered them South and she didn’t comment. It was his turn to pick a direction and most of them were the same. Except this one wasn’t because when he scrambled out to open her door he saw her recognise the smell, and it felt like the first free breath either of them had taken in the longest time. The resort was long closed, but they had what they needed and for a week things felt almost normal. He bought marshmallows and she let him toast them and feed them to her, she laughed when her chin got sticky and let him kiss it clean. It all felt so clean, mountain bright mornings and normal. everyday things like washing up and planning what they would do. They walked instead of running and at night, in zipped together sleeping bags he learned the topography of her body the way she was relearning her childhood sanctuary. Many things were broken or weathered, but the heart was still the same.

* * *

 

**(’05)**

It wasn’t a valentine but a letter was better than silence. He’d given his blessing for her to return, to take the deal and try and find a way to bring them back to life. She’d told him goodbye in a funeral voice and for the first two weeks he though perhaps she had buried him in her history, or bought her own freedom with his location. Mulder hates himself for doubting but demons have loud voices when you’re alone in the woods. He’d put off visiting the mailbox in case he found it empty, and found it full of proof that Scully was till who she’d always been; honest, efficient, improbably attached to him. Still, the months had dragged as she proved her innocence and scrawny, one-way envelopes were cold comfort compared to warm Scully at his side. Last night he missed her so badly that he’d jacked off into her empty shampoo bottle and regretted it instantly, even though the scent of her lingered in her suitcase, it felt wrong to spoil anything she’d left behind to satisfy his selfish need for intimacy. She would find a way, he trusted that, and perhaps this was it. A Virginia address, a key, nothing more. He is on the road in a heartbeat. The car has been packed since the day he left her at the bus stop last summer. 

* * *

 

**(’06)**

Mulder cooks, because this is what he does now. Scully works late, because this is what she does now. The pasta is mush and the sauce has burn on the bottom but it doesn’t matter, because their life has dinner time and bed time and things that normal couples take for granted. There’s a A4 envelope, crooked against the rioja, with her name on that she’s pretending not to be curious about, and a lump in her coat pocket that wasn’t there when she left this morning. It is all painfully, wonderfully trite, and there’s a fire and a blanket and gratitude for the small things caught in the air-pockets between his front and her back. He watches over her shoulder, nose in her hair as her thumbnail scythes into the brown paper with surgical precision. Her card is home made, a collage of clippings from his files, cryptids in love with humans, people in lust with cryptids, love potions, brain altering sex-waves, all romance related X-Files only slightly more ridiculous than the one inside. It flutters loose and lands in her lap with lightness that belies how long it took them to get there. One photograph, of one perfect moment, him and her, whole, happy and at home, blurry from the crappy cellphone camera but something real they have never had before. Proof of their own impossible. Something to believe in. 


	3. 14-19 (2007-2012)

**(’07)**

Perhaps it isn’t everything Scully dreamed of as a little girl but she learned long ago to let go of dreams. She threw the small things, the heart shaped boxes and the pink sparkly envelopes after the bigger disappointments. If she dared to look back she would see their streamers tangled with broken picket fences, and spring churchyards in wedding whites, haunted by impossible children… so she doesn’t look. She’s used to it, more than she can ever get used to these witching-hour wakings, blind nights where nightmares creep into their bed and sink their claws into her sleeping mind. She reaches out and find Mulder, still sleeping but something solid to put her back against. Time was she would have woken him and let him write a happy ending, replace her panicked breaths with his own, count down her heartbeats until they matched his and then kiss her back to sleep. That was before the dark figure in her dreams was a boy with Mulder’s face. She thinks perhaps if he rolls over now, if she sees him in this moment, then it will all be certain, all be real. Instead, she contents herself with touch, something they have often been deprived of through the years, and writes her Valentine with her finger on his skin.

* * *

 

**(’08)**

The second she gets through the door she regrets her sentimentality. There are cookies from his favourite deli in the bottom of her bag but the study door is closed and she feels like they will be seen as a taunt rather than a treat. She hadn’t expected rose petals or wine but she’d hoped for closeness, for a crack in the wall of his obsession just big enough for her to sneak through. She’d found one at Christmas, Mulder cracking a smile big enough to warm the drafty room that the fire never quite managed, and the holidays had been happy. But January is a long, bitter month and she has lost a patient and he has lost a whole life. The cookies go stale under her scrubs and she eats her dinner with her back against the door, listening to the click of his keyboard, his mind wandering further from the light. 

* * *

 

**(’09)**

He’s trying, so hard, they both are, but there is a disconnect in their network, a misfiring synapse that follows each gesture with a flash of pain. Scully finds the roses, dead, in her locker on February 16th. She hasn’t been home in days, she’s barely slept and of course she forgot Valentines day. The roses smell of rot and remind her of cancer; the card she failed to send cuts deep, guilty lines into the palms of her hands. It’s like Fiji all over again, idyllic scenery and gaping silence, salt-rimmed glasses tainting fresh fruit drinks and an attempt to be something they never have been. She thinks about calling home but it’s easier to answer her pager than the questions Mulder will ask without saying anything. It’s too late to save the flowers, and maybe her relationship, but perhaps today she can save a life. 

* * *

 

**(’10)**

‘Mulder’

One word under a mass produced sentiment on gas station card signals the end.

It would have been better if he had forgotten. It would have been easier if she hadn’t gone home early enough for him to be awake. 

That way she wouldn’t have seen the hurt on his face as he tossed the lonely missive across the bare dining room table. That way he wouldn’t have heard her cry when she saw her name, bare and accusatory above that same meaningless, catchphrase.

It has taken them both to get here but neither of them can seem to find a way out.  Scully takes the card to remind her why she is leaving him. 

* * *

 

**(’11)**

_Anaheim, February 14th_

“Drinks for two”, the placard in the store had announced but she’s finished the six pack and she still feels empty. She watches Caddyshack as a punishment and lets herself cry as a reward. She wonders what he is doing but she doesn’t call.

_Unremarkable House_

He’s been watching the phone and the bottle of scotch with equal intensity. He knows if he grasps for either one that he wont be able to stop until he sees the bottom. He wonders what she’s doing and tries to hate her. He can’t hate her, but he can hate himself. He takes the whiskey.

* * *

 

**(’12)**

He’ll take what he can get, a room key in a blank envelope and everything in her expression telling him not to ask her why. So he doesn’t, he drops his anger on the featureless carpet, he leaves regret on the door with the “ Do Not Disturb” and prays to whatever sadistic deity is ruining his life this year that he can find a way to translate Scully’s body language into something that will last.

Her hair is longer than ever and it helps her to feel like a different person, even as his familiar hands on her ribcage define her as no more and no less than she has always been. Mulder’s body is heavier than when she left him, hard with muscle and worry and as she pushes him beneath her she wonders if it’s strong enough yet for the mind it carries. She stops thinking when he grinds his thumb harshly into her pubic bone, crushing her defences and reducing her to ‘Please!’ The next day in the morning glow before goodbye she wonders what she was begging him for. Pleasure, and perhaps a little pain, and maybe forgiveness. She pushes thought away and pulls him back for a little more forgetting. 

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted to @crossedbeams on tumblr


End file.
